In The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, authors Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird challenge their readers to become more effective thinkers.  They assert that throughout history, what the world’s most successful and accomplished people have in common is not solely great intellect but rather, a different way of thinking.  Furthermore, Burger and Starbird emphasize that these concrete thinking strategies can be taught to anyone as a means to enhance creativity and foster achievement. 

The authors introduce five learning strategies in this book.  To make these even easier to remember, they associated each technique with a specific element (a metaphor which feels a bit forced at times).  Briefly, the strategies are as follows:  Earth, understand deeply; Fire, make mistakes; Air, raise questions; Water, follow the flow of ideas; and The Quintessential Element, Change.  After providing information on “How to Read this Book” (which suggests reading the book three times), Burger and Starbird address each element in turn.  Their chapters combine short paragraphs, brief anecdotes, personal stories, exercise suggestions, and the like; the narrative is constantly broken up, similar to a …For Dummies-style book.

I found the value of “Earth” to be minimal.  Here, the authors primarily highlight the dangers of rote memorization; their main advice seems to be to simply spend more time with a subject in order to learn it more thoroughly.  Conversely, “Fire” provided more practical information, offering specific examples of how mistakes can be useful as well as suggesting ideas for building on failures to find success.  But the chapter on questioning is again more basic, providing common-sense suggestions such as exploring issues from various viewpoints and ask better, meta questions.  In “Water,” Burger and Starbird are even more vague, talking about how new ideas often arise from the unexpected and recommending constantly looking for ways to improve upon concepts—hardly earth-shattering advice.

At this point, there’s not much left to the book.  The authors themselves state that the change chapter is the “most dispensable,” noting that readers may choose to “just skip it” (not exactly a positive message for a book purporting to be about deep thinking!).  In this section, Burger and Starbird merely make the point that changing means doing things differently.  In the brief (11 pages) final chapter, the authors provide a rather simplistic summary of the elements, providing readers with title headings for prior chapters and referring back to prior sections of the book.

In the end, the main problem that I had with 5 Elements was a lack of a clear audience for this information.  It seems likely that more dedicated learners and intellectuals are apt to discover the main tenets posited by the authors for themselves.  On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that those who are perpetually struggling with scholarly pursuits would give much credence to—or even take the time to read—a work such as this one.  For this reason, I believe that the subject of this volume may have been better suited to a magazine article, blog, or other venue rather than this format.

© 2013 Beth Cholette

Beth Cholette, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who provides psychotherapy to college students.